The Oppenheimer Report 10/6/14

 

I apologize in advance if today’s off-the-cuff ramblings seem particularly disjointed. The Fall rains and the Jewish High Holy Days have left me feeling a little anxious and reflective. Last night, while I was deleting some old emails, I came across one from my recently deceased artist friend Frank Riccio. It was from March of 2013, and he was ribbing me, in a manner so typical of Frank, about how fortunate he felt to have been mentioned in my report. He jokingly suggested that, like so many other forms of electronic correspondence, my reference to him in my report will perhaps someday be a matter of historical record. He said: “And like every phone call and text message, all will be routed through and saved at the giant data facility in Utah!  ~ƒ” Now, a year and a half later, his amusing email remains, but Frank is gone. Being the neurotic, overthinking worrywart that I am, that prompted a flood of apprehensions about my own mortality and about the fates of those I love. It is that queasy feeling I get in my stomach when I revisit the epiphany that almost everything is out of my control. Last week, I mused about letting go of things from my past, and about how I struggle to live in the moment. Last Friday, on the Eve of Yom Kippur, we learned that a dear cousin who is our age was admitted to the hospital in Toronto suffering from severe pain. He’d had a history of colon cancer and we were obviously concerned that this affliction has re-emerged. We helplessly await news of his condition. Perhaps I read too much in to the weather. Around here at least, Fall has returned early, and with a vengeance. For me, Fall is the season when change is most apparent, and as the October winds cleanse the trees of their rusty foliage, I feel strangely out of step with the march of time.

No doubt, Yom Kippur makes me more reflective than I usually am, especially because I fast from sundown to sundown, and this accentuates the discomfort of self-awareness. Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement, the day when Jews ask forgiveness for all the wrongs we have done in the year. Comedian Lewis Black, a Jew himself, does a funny routine about it in his hysterical, angry, ranting style. Ridiculous as he thinks it is to assume that any religion can absolve one of one’s wrongdoings, he says that at least the Catholics don’t let it build up. Catholics confess their sins on a regular basis, but the Jews, who have a black belt in guilt, hold in all their sins for the year and purge them all in one day. That’s a lot of apologizing for one day. Mostly, I regret taking my good fortune for granted. I’m talking specifically about family and friends. What if I’d spent more time with my parents, what if I’d kept in touch with Frank, what if I been more charitable with my heart to people who are now gone? Why don’t I call my sister and nephews more often? Who have I forgotten, only to be reminded when they are gone? Hopefully, I’ll improve on all of this in the coming next year.

The same neurosis that begs these unanswerable questions compels me to write songs. I never sit down with the intention of writing a song about anything. Songs come to me from my personal experience, or they are triggered by a news event underscoring the human condition. They simply come out of me the way weeds come out of fertile soil, and I have over time become more vigilant about recording them when they occur. Not all of them are clear and concise, and not many of them are good or meaningful to anyone but me. Yet they are my little garden of neurotic ideas, and I cultivate them. And they will be here when I am gone, recognized or otherwise; my emotional footprint on the sands of time. Ugh, that was horrible, wasn’t it? Last night I consulted my song notebook and there were twenty or thirty pages of recent stream of consciousness lyrics. Verbal diarrhea. Over the past few weeks, I have been on Facebook quite a lot, because that is largely how the musical community up here communicates. The danger of Facebook is that it sometimes overwhelms me: too much information. It is, in some watered down way, a medium of connectivity, and in any event, I drink the Kool-Aid. When the annual Day of Atonement arrives, or when I am confronted with the passage of time, measured by new aches and pains, or watching a niece or nephew get older in photos on Facebook, or by something as mundane as the amount of dog food consumed by Jasper (a good thing, by the way), I sometimes become concerned by my growing incapability to prepare for the coming winter.

As I sometimes do, I consulted my report from about a year ago to see what was going on in my life at the time. A year ago next week, the U.S. government had shut down in an impasse over The Affordable Care Act. In that same entry I mentioned that I got caught in the dark with the ATV for a long, cold, drive home from my friend Buck’s house. He lives about ten or fifteen miles south of us on the big lake, and because I got delayed, the ride home was frosty and a bit nerve racking. Up here, Mother Nature is not too forgiving of the unprepared, and that frosty night I was underdressed. From what all the local “experts” say, we have another cold winter ahead of us. Today, a year later, the world mobilizes for what might be an escalating religious war, and global leadership does not seem to be any stronger, or less divisive, than it was last year. I just finished recording a song I wrote t 9 years ago about these grey days …

“And time just seems to swirl up like the leaves in a blow

So much spinning out of my control
I want to solve the problems of this oh so troubled world
But I can’t even seem to solve my own …” –excerpt from The Wind Begins to Blow

(Destined to be a bigger hit than Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini)

To the members of my tribe, and to all the rest of you as well, Shanah Tova – have a good year.

 

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED